[Dev] PyCon 2006 braindump

[Alec Flett]

PyCon 2006 was fun this year, but it had a very different feel from the 
previous year. This year there seemed to be many more people with 
polished products and fewer small hacks.

A few big things seem to have changed in the Python world in the 
lastyear. Web frameworks have really gotten their act together. The core 
python language is getting cool new features in 2.5, but even more 
interesting is that Python's package management story is really 
improving. Finally it seemed like there are more and more real uses of 
Python on the internet. (as opposed to individuals' own hacks and tricks)

With strong presentations by Django and TurboGears, it was obvious that 
the Web Frameworks field is finally narrowing. Instead of dozens of 
template engines, app servers, and database conduits, there are now a 
3-4 really promising frameworks that can go up against Ruby on Rails. 
The TurboGears folks put on a really slick display complete with 
handouts and engineers in pressed buttondowns.

Python 2.5 is looking to be very promising. I'm starting to catch onto a 
theme in Python that I hadn't noticed before: add really powerful 
features to the language that you can use when writing your foundational 
layers, so that your application-specific code can be very simple. The 
new 'with' keyword demonstrates this well: Its fairly complex to set up 
a "context manager" class that behaves nicely with 'with' but once you 
have one set up, it sure is easy to use. Python seems to be all about 
placing the burden on application infrastructure to make application 
behavior simple.

And that brings me to eggs, the Cheese Shop, and all that. There were 
many references throughout the conference to eggs, but I don't think 
many people knew what they were until the presentation on the 2nd day. 
The room was packed well beyond capacity and there were lots and lots of 
questions answered mostly by our own Phillip Eby. I got the feeling that 
everyone was still a bit confused, but knew that eggs was just what they 
were looking for to manage bundles of code/data/etc.

Guido made mention of the CheeseShop, which is basically Python's 
equivalent of CPAN. It took Python a while to get there but I guess its 
getting quite popular. At the same time it seems that combining this 
with eggs is going to make for a pretty interesting distribution model 
for applications.

Other highlights:
   * The "American Greetings Interactive" talk was kind of neat - 
showing how they use python pretty much everywhere in the organization 
and still serve some 90M pageviews in a day. The overall message was 
"You think python doesn't scale? It scales as much as you can write"
   * PyParsing - a dirt-simple parsing module. Nothing fancy but it 
looked like an incredibly easy to use, easy to read, way of parsing any 
grammer. Great for scraping web pages
   * saw twill in use at a lightning talk - neat!
   * Stackless Python - used in the game "Eve Online" I understand this 
a little more - basically a way of doing non-preemptive lightweight 
threading. Their server has 70,000 threads running at any given time. Wow.
   * Some random guy thought we (OSAF) were really cool, to be making a 
product like Chandler. He thought we had made tremendous progress and 
also that we were to thank for the popularity of wxPython. I think he 
was exaggerating a bit but it was a nice bunch of compliments anyway :)
   * A bunch of random people seemed really interested in Chandler in 
general - lots of good questions at the BoF, and lots of people who want 
lots of different features like Palm syncing. Lets hope they feel like 
contributing soon :)

Sprint stuff:
Overall the sprint went well - we only had 1 guy with a computer but he 
was able to get up to speed and developing much, much sooner than last 
year. He had an contact detail-view complete in 1 day! I worked on a "43 
Things" (http://www.43things.com/) parcel with another guy and used it 
to explore Annontations as an alternative to creating new kinds.

I hope that we do a "State of Chandler" next year, (beyond katie's 
great, but short, lightning talk) because I think we're really getting 
to the point where people are excited about this crazy app we're writing.


Alec